Well then they should have coded the game so that it scales well. Seriously, I know how difficult it is to program games, but setting up some sort of font system would be a good idea in general to allow the game to scale.

I have a sony SDTV and the text in Dead Rising while a bit small was still easily readable for me. That said, if it is something that can;t be patched then fix it and reissue the discs and pull all the old ones.

So neither the boneheads at Capcom nor MS QA thought to test it out on a SDTV? Or perhaps they did and it was too late? Either way, the game sold well and they have our money. Why would they waste time on a patch?*

*Note: I didn't say why should they make a patch. Because it's obviously the right thing to do for customers in our new environment where they can no longer return flawed games.

Well then they should have coded the game so that it scales well. Seriously, I know how difficult it is to program games, but setting up some sort of font system would be a good idea in general to allow the game to scale.

Doing so would've required knowing that scaling is necessary. I think it's pretty obvious they didn't test extensively on lower end TVs.

Quote from: Arkon on September 13, 2006, 11:09:03 AM

That said, if it is something that can;t be patched then fix it and reissue the discs and pull all the old ones.

That kind of move is reserved for Hot Coffee-style debacles. It can be financially devastating. As annoyed as people are with this issue, it is only a major annoyance. Congress will most likely not get involved, and I seriously doubt any lawsuits will come out of it

Well, either it'd be an easy fix and they just don't want to do it, or they didn't follow good coding practices and hard-coded the font+size of the text at every instance of the text popping up rather than using a global variable. In which case their programmers are incredibly stupid.

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I believe most fonts for video games are stored in customized picture files. So it's not just a matter of incrementing a number to get a larger size. They'd have to ship out a new file with the larger font images. That in itself isn't a big deal. What is probably tripping them up is that they'd have to reposition and rescale the speech bubbles and the such throughout the entire game. That's a lot of testing and work (which should've been done in QA 'natch).

So I understand that it is genuinely a lot of work. But it is a screw up on their end and shafting the customer isn't the best PR decision. Even if it is the best financial one in the short run.

How about the simple solution of giving you an option to make the text stay on the screen longer? On my SDTV, the Dead Rising text is difficult, but not impossible to read. If it would just stay on the screen 50% longer I'd be just find.

Whoa it just hit me. There's no voice?! Wow so advanced it's arcane...

(ok ok that's the last jab).

Yeah, it's kind of a weird omission. The text that people are referring to is the "mission objectives" that are delivered via cellphone so it's kind of bizarre they didn't voice act them considering they wouldn't even need to bother with corresponding character animation.

Whoa it just hit me. There's no voice?! Wow so advanced it's arcane...

(ok ok that's the last jab).

Yeah, it's kind of a weird omission. The text that people are referring to is the "mission objectives" that are delivered via cellphone so it's kind of bizarre they didn't voice act them considering they wouldn't even need to bother with corresponding character animation.

Maybe they ran out of disk space... shame they don't have Blu-Ray.

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